Mary had a little lamb

Remember the nursery rhyme, ‘Mary had a little lamb …’? No doubt this simple poem was based on a real, living, lamb. Somebody, somewhere thought and planned and wrote the rhyme. It required a designer. So, too, the real lamb that inspired it reveals a masterpiece of design and, therefore, a Master Designer.

Preparation for birth

As the birth of a lamb approaches, the ewe’s body prepares in many ways, the most noticeable changes being caused by hormones. The ewe becomes more tame and quiet. The mothering instinct takes over, sometimes to such an extent that she tries to steal other newborn lambs.

Her tissues and bones soften so they can move and flex during birth. Her udder prepares colostrum, the first milk. Inside her, the lamb automatically positions itself for birth. With head resting on its front legs, it forms a wedge to gently force the birth canal open during delivery, allowing its wider shoulders to follow through. If a leg moves out of position, or the head moves to one side or downwards, both lamb and mother will perish, without human intervention. The same is usually true if the lamb presents hind feet first.

Sheep with abnormal birthing positions, left to themselves, would die. Natural selection would thus produce an easy-birthing breed, but this is not evolution. No new information is added to the gene pool. Instead, a fault (as a result of a fallen world) is automatically corrected.

When the lamb is born, it is covered with the broken placental membranes. It is also wet and slippery from the natural yellow lubrication oils that eased the birth process. The ewe seems to like the taste of this and licks it off the lamb. This is important, as the licking partially dries the lamb’s wool. In certain conditions, evaporation of moisture from an unlicked lamb could cause it to lose body heat and die.

Amazing birth wool

Newborn lambs are covered with a densely packed, finely curled wool. As the lamb moves around and dries, this wool ‘unsprings’ from its dense, skin-hugging position. It forms a thin layer of curly, spring-like wool, trapping the air and forming an insulating blanket.

The new wool commences growing immediately, but it is never as dense and finely curled as the birth wool. The wool is also rich in the natural oil, called lanolin, which waterproofs it, adding to its insulation. Thus, God provides preplanned cover for His lambs. And in cold, windy, wet weather, with no shelter in the fields, the lamb can take refuge from the elements on the lee side of the sheep.

First feed

Almost as soon as the lamb hits the ground, it struggles to its feet for its first feed. It is amazing to see a newborn lamb, yellow, wet and slimy, still trailing placental tissues, staggering around on wobbly legs. Where did its strength come from? The sheep will sometimes position herself so the lamb can easily find her milk. But usually she is distracted with licking, and keeps swinging her hindquarters away, making the lamb find its own way to the ‘milk bar’.

As the lamb bumps around, it stimulates the sheep to lower her hindquarters, sometimes until she is almost crouching. This brings the udder forward, making the teats easily accessible from behind her legs, usually angled towards the lamb’s mouth. When the udder is too low, or the teats hang straight down, the young lamb can starve to death. This is often a fault in the genes, so a good farmer culls these ewes from his flock. Each teat is initially sealed with a tiny ‘plug’, which is removed by the lamb’s first sucking. This plug prevents mastitis by stopping germs entering the udder before birth.

A good sheep will stand still so that the lamb can find this essential first feed. Who put that instinct into the sheep? Blind chance? Not likely! Again, who put the sucking instinct into the lamb? If a lamb doesn’t suck within a short time of birth, for whatever reason, it usually loses this natural urge and if left to itself will die. And how does the lamb, hardly able to stand, know where to find the milk supply?

The colostrum kick-start

The first milk, called colostrum, is remarkable. It has over twice as much protein as regular milk. It is a thick, yellow super-concentrate, packed with extra nutrients and antibodies needed by, but not naturally present in, the newborn lamb.

Colostrum kick-starts the immune and digestive systems, removing meconium (a sticky dark brown substance) from the gut of the newborn lamb, getting it digesting normally. Colostrum also provides a slippery protective coating over the gut, shielding it from rotavirus and other infections.1 It is, of course, at exactly the right temperature—blood temperature—neither too cold to chill the lamb nor too hot to upset digestion.

A small drink of colostrum straight after birth can keep a lamb alive for about 12 hours, without any other food. In cold weather a lamb will die within half an hour of birth if it gets no colostrum. It has seemingly miraculous qualities, in some conditions reviving almost-dead lambs.

With our modern advances, the farmer may mix a replacement with extra protein, vitamins, minerals and antibodies. But it is only a second-class substitute. The lamb will probably live, but won’t do very well. Without colostrum, real or man-made, the poor wee lamb is bound to die. So, the farmer will obtain genuine colostrum from another ewe or newly calved cow in an emergency. The latter, of course, is designed for calves and, with lower levels of proteins and fats, doesn’t quite suit the lambs.2 God designed sheep colostrum to perfectly suit lambs. Man, with all his science and chemistry, cannot produce a perfect substitute. Master plan or evolutionary accident? There is only one reasonable answer.

The lamb needs at least two feeds of colostrum to get started. Its ability to absorb the lymphocytes and immunoglobins reduces with time, the most being absorbed in the first few hours after birth. This is when the sheep produces colostrum and when the lamb is most exposed to infection.

After a day or two, the ewe’s milk changes composition to regular sheep’s milk. The lamb now produces its own antibodies, as the newly coated, protected digestive cells in the gut are shed every four days.1 It is incredible how the composition of milk changes exactly as the lamb needs it. Perfect timing. Perfect evolutionary change? Never! What would have happened while this system was evolving? All lambs would have died and sheep become extinct. This system had to be fully in place right from the birth of the very first lamb. No lambs, no sheep. End of story.

Feeding behaviour

As the lamb searches for milk, it will butt the ewe’s udder. Again, this is no mere accident nor impatience on the part of the lamb, but a predesigned response mechanism. This butting stimulates the release of oxytocin hormones, which contract the milk sacs causing the ewe to let down her milk.

The mother sheep identifies her lamb mostly by smell. As it feeds, she constantly checks it is the correct lamb by smelling it, thus bumping the root of its tail and hindquarters. This touching, in turn, stimulates the lamb to fresh bursts of intense sucking. Not only does it obtain the life-sustaining milk, but the ewe’s uterus is stimulated to contract, thus helping it to expel the afterbirth (or other lambs, in multiple birth situations).

If a lamb dies, an orphan lamb can be fostered onto the ewe. An old-fashioned trick was to cover the new lamb with the dead lamb’s skin. The first lamb may have been brown and the new lamb snowy white. But even with head and ears poking out from under the old skin, the sheep will accept the lamb because it smells correct.

Nowadays, we have sprays and potions to put on the ewe’s nose and the lamb’s head and tail. These do the same job until you put more than one newly mothered set in the same paddock. Then confusion reigns. Whose lamb is whose? They all smell the same. Like human fingerprints, only God can give each sheep and lamb set its own identifying smell. Man’s imitations can never match the perfection of God’s originals. ‘O LORD, You are my God. I will exalt You, I will praise Your name, For You have done wonderful things …’ (Isaiah 25:1).

Protective care

The ewe is extremely protective for the first few days after birth. Any dog, cat or other small animal coming too near is challenged or charged. The sheep will circle around her lamb and if it walks away, will call it back. When her udder feels full, she will call it to drink. When the weather turns rough, she’ll lead it to shelter.

As the lamb grows bigger and stronger, the ewe’s care diminishes. She no longer fusses and, if she can see it is safe, will often not answer its bleating. As the lamb gets older it can butt her so hard that her hindquarters almost lift off the ground. She’ll walk off while it is drinking if she thinks it’s had enough.

As the lamb matures it begins eating grass, so for many weeks it is living on both grass and milk. As it grows more independent, the ewe’s milk supply diminishes. At this stage with domestic animals, man steps in and ends the weaning stage by separating the two. The weaned lamb then eats only grass and its digestive system can no longer cope with milk.

Mary had her little lamb, obviously well fed on colostrum before it adopted Mary as mum. Like the rhyme, the lamb’s birth was preplanned by a Master Designer. Without a whiff of evolution. Not a baa of it!

Mars at its closest for 60,000 years?

In August 2003 the media trumpeted the claim that Mars was at its closest to Earth
in 60,000 years. Is this evidence that the planets are at least 60,000 years old?

NASA image

Teardrop-shaped landforms reminiscent of those carved by floodwaters on Earth are
south of the Elysium volcanoes in Mars’ Cerberus region. Were they carved
by huge floods of water?

As they orbit the sun, Earth passes Mars every 780 days or so.1 Their
proximity at passing varies, but the 55.65 million km of August was the closest
ever recorded.

NASA image

False-colour image of a portion of Mars globe showing extent of theoretical liquid
sea thought to have once covered the planet.

Extrapolating backwards using today’s rates of planetary motions gives a figure
of 60,000 years ago as the time when Earth and Mars would previously have been this
close, if they had actually been in existence that long ago. And also if
there had been no motion changes. These ‘ifs’ are unprovable
assumptions, and we have a supremely reliable historical record (the Bible) indicating
that the first of these assumptions is not correct—rather, Mars has
only existed since Day 4 of creation (Gen
1:16) around 6,000 years ago.

At the August pass, Mars may well have been at its closest ever to Earth, but factors
or past events of which we are unaware could potentially have affected their motions.
Mars could conceivably have been as close (or even closer) before, though there
is no way of verifying such speculations.2

In any case, there is emphatically nothing in Mars’s current motion
or position which is incompatible with its being created and set in motion 6,000
years ago. The media’s constant repetition of ‘60,000 years’ is
simply an assumption of long ages, not a confirmation of them.